sound and action of open water as it freezes”?
For all that landed pride, though, Scotland is a country divided in
ways that places like Finland and South Korea are not. It is divided
not just over the perennial question of whether to cleave from
England. The urban poor are unmoored from the land, and from
Scotland’s deep culture of resilience. Some would argue the two are
related. Consequently, the country’s attitude toward nature has a more
desperate tinge; the survival of a culture and of a people are in play.
The idea of spending more time outdoors is emerging as an important
tool for regaining health and sanity already lost.
Nowhere is the country’s social divide more evident than in
Glasgow. Upon arriving, I was immediately struck by the down-and-
out vibe just below my hotel. Edinburgh is all lovingly preserved
stone architecture, uni students rushing about, tourists buying tweed,
and Harry Potter fans taking selfies in front of the Elephant House
café, where J. K. Rowling did some scribbling. But downtown
Glasgow recalls the Bowery of the 1930s: sleeveless drunks in the
middle of the day, young people smoking sullenly on the streets,
Here, the underclass is largely white, hopped up, and pissed off.
Parts of Greater Glasgow face the lowest life expectancies in all
of the European Union. In some neighborhoods a man can expect to
live to 54, while 12 miles away he will live to 82. Sixty percent of the
city’s excess deaths are triggered by just four things—drugs, alcohol,
suicide and violence. Alcohol-related deaths increased fourfold
between 1991 and 2002. The main cause: economic disparities driven
by four generations of unemployment following the dismantling of
manufacturing and mining in the 1970s and 1980s.
It’s this divide that gets Richard Mitchell, an English
epidemiologist at the University of Glasgow, up in the morning.
While the Finnish and Japanese nature studies targeted the educated
middle class, Mitchell is looking at the beaten-down poor. He’s spent
years researching effective messaging for preventing alcoholism and